Miscellaneous

Tips for creators

If you have created a stimulus set yourself, here are a few tips:

Choose a license for distributing your work. As you can see in the list below, many creators do not specify a license. Unlicensed work is non-free by default, which is problematic for usage and sharing. For a useful guide, see http://creativecommons.org/choose/.

Upload your work to an easily accessible location. Do not upload your stimuli as supplementary information on a (paywalled) publisher's website. A good site for uploading academic material is FigShare.

Presentation software

If you are looking for software to present stimuli, take a look at OpenSesame, a free and graphical experiment builder.

Picture sets

Fractals and natural scenes

Description: A collection of fractals and natural images with visual-search targets (a small F or H) embedded in them. The fractals are original. The natural images are adapted from the UPenn natural image database. For each image, a pupillary luminance map and saliency map is available (see paper for details).

Amsterdam library of object images (ALOI)

Description: An extensive set of photos of small objects. The viewing angles and lighting conditions (illumination angle and color) have been systematically varied for each object. Stereo images ("3D") are also inluded.

CIPR still images

Dartmouth database of children’s faces

Description: Contains images of 40 male and 40 female models between the ages of 6 and 16. Models are photographed on a black background and are wearing black bibs and black hats to cover hair and ears. They are photographed from 5 different camera angles and pose 8 different facial expressions. Models were rated by independent raters and are ranked for the overall believability of their poses.

International affective pictures system (IAPS)

Description: A collection of pictures that have been rated on valence, arousal and dominance. Unfortunately, you can't download these pictures directly, but you have to put in a request (see the link below). They are freely available for non-profit research, though.

FaceScrub

Description: FaceSrub comprises a total of 107,818 face images of male and female 530 celebrities, with about 200 images per person. The images were retrieved from the Internet and are taken under real-world situations (uncontrolled conditions). Name and gender annotations of the faces are included.

Migo et al.'s photos with similarity information

Description: A collection of gray-scale photos, with similarity ratings for pairs of objects within a set (for example, the similarity between pairs of different pens). The idea is very nice, but unfortunately the quality of the photos is fairly low. Also, the stimuli are paywalled together with the paper.

MultiPic: A standardized set of 750 drawings with multilingual norms

Description: The Multilingual Picture (MultiPic) databank is the result of an international collaborative project intended to provide the scientific community with a set of publicly available 750 drawings from common concrete concepts created by the same author, standardized for name agreement and visual complexity in several languages.

Snodgrass and Vanderwart object pictorial set

Description: A classic set of black and white line drawings. Apparently there are some licensing issues and, despite the fact that this is a widely known set of pictures, it seems hard to get a hold of them. I would recommend using the revised set by Rossion & Pourtois instead.